In my humble opinion every animal consistent of multiple cells alive on this planet developed sleep for just one reason: the very same reason plants sleep. Our planet has a night phase and without sun little energy is left. So as a consequence the best one can do is to clean up internal processes or go into some sort of energy saving mode. Ofc this is heretic to some individuals...
_probably_ right. Wikipedia: "Since one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable." [1]
Not even "probably" right. Eg Quantum Physics is more complex than Newtonian. OcRaz is a heuristic that advises that simpler hypotheses should be tested first. It's not a magic SCIENCE! gun.
Occams Razor, often misused as you imply, says not to multiply elements beyond necessity. Newtonian physics doesn't explain observed quantum effects and so there is a necessity to use a more complex system to explain all the observations.
You're quite right to note it's heuristic nature, some people use it as if it's truth generating.
And this is easily testable. We just house a population of animals who sleep in a hermetically sealed environment that provides all that they need, but is never in darkness. After a couple of hundred million years we open the door and see if anyone is napping.
Seriously though, the existence of nocturnal animals kinda puts that argument to bed. While there might be selection pressure to specialise within day or night cycles, it's simply not plausible that no animal, in the vastness of the biospehere, has not generalised to do both, without some critical and fundamental flaw.
there might be a differential equation that describes a small part of beings (not a "huge number") benefitting from the free energy that diurnal animals might be at night. There's an equilibrium that's clearly preferential to daylight animals.
Point in case, bats as my primary example seem to be pretty archaic, with highly developed specializations, but nothing really highly developed. Which I see as an expression of the low entropy in the dark (the signal to noise ratio for sound is rather good at night though). Deep see animals are mostly outliers inhabiting a niche, as well. Whereas people as the highest developed species, if I may say so myself, don't even quite get along with crossing the day-night boundaries, I don't see your argument at all. You are rather proving the point.
The above mentioned study links raising HDAC2 to reverse effects of Alzheimer's disease.
I doubt that the autism study with mice really 'cured' autism. I think the cancer drug reduced cognitive abilities, so mice seemed to react 'normal'.